Many companies are re-engineering their enterprise computing systems to be more effective and productive. However, even these companies must continue to integrate with legacy computing systems at their partners. Consequently, enterprise computing systems must be able to run in a distributed and heterogeneous environment, performing complex single tasks in parallel. This need is increasingly being met through the use of workflow-based applications, i.e. software applications executing specific and defined business processes, which are executable modules of code that perform a predefined business function.
Companies need to be continually more flexible to react to ever-changing business conditions. For example, companies using business process-based workflow applications must have the ability to adapt quickly to changes and/or upgrades of existing business processes. Also, the time required for execution of business processes must be minimized, and their execution made more resource-efficient.
The drive for efficiency can make business process management inflexible and not configurable to dynamic company-specific needs. For instance, a business process can be defined according to a process definition, represented by a process graph in a workflow builder tool, and then delivered to a customer for storage and execution. Workflows can be designed for any number of business processes.
Distributed business processes lack conventionally lack a standardized integration model that can be used to configure, integrate and monitor the message exchange between loosely coupled or heterogeneous business applications. Customers want to monitor cross-component business processes. One challenge is to monitor cross-component business processes of loosely coupled and business processes distributed across business systems or applications. For the monitoring, a customer needs a standardized integration model for the distributed business processes as well as a monitoring process.